Establishes Free, Private Data Service For All Farmers And Calls
For Open-Standards Industry Alliance To Drive Precision Agriculture
Adoption

January 31, 2014 12:03 PM Eastern Standard Time

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Data science has the potential to fundamentally improve the productivity
and sustainability of global agriculture. With recommendations
customized for their fields, farmers will continue to make more informed
decisions that help them maximize their yield potential and use our
planet’s finite resources more efficiently. However, some barriers still
exist to unlocking the tremendous potential of data science in
agriculture due to understandable uncertainty about the privacy of
farmers’ data.

Today, The Climate Corporation is announcing a number of groundbreaking
principles and commitments related to data use and privacy in an openly
published Guiding Principles on Data and Privacy statement, available
online at www.climate.com/principles.

“The application of data science in agriculture is relatively new, and
with the development of new technologies comes some level of uncertainty
about its potential implications. In our experience, farmers are more
likely to embrace new technologies that will drive the evolution of
agricultural production when they have certainty about the use, privacy
and control of the data they personally generate on their own farms,”
said David Friedberg, CEO of The Climate Corporation.

“We want to immediately and transparently address some farmers’ concerns
about data use and privacy, while advancing the conversation about
industry standards that support farmers’ needs. Farmers come first and
we need to do what we can to make sure the industry is adopting
practices and standards that do what’s best for the farmer,” said
Friedberg.

Two years ago, Monsanto established its Integrated Farming Systems
platform that aimed to combine data science with precision agriculture
technologies to help farmers derive new value. Recently, these research
and product development teams, along with the Precision Planting group,
transitioned to The Climate Corporation, led by Friedberg.

“Throughout the process of building our platform, we’ve reached out to
our farmer customers and industry stakeholders for their input and
they’ve told us that farmers need to know how their data will be used
and protected in order for them to embrace data science in agriculture.
The Climate Corporation believes that farmers must have control over the
data they provide to us, and they must be able to move it easily across
different technology platforms,” said Friedberg. “It’s our
responsibility to remove the roadblocks to the growth and adoption of
these important technologies. We realize that combining farmers’ data
with unique modeling capabilities requires trust. Thus, we are sharing
our guiding principles and commitments today.”

The company is committing to several guiding principles that will drive
its development of data related products and services:

Farmers own the data they create.The company will make it
easy for farmers to control who can access the data they provide and
for what purpose, and enable farmers to easily remove that data from
our systems. We will only use a farmer’s data to deliver and improve
the services for which they are subscribing. We will ensure safeguards
are in place to protect farmer information from outside parties, and
we will not sell customer-provided data to third parties.

We will provide basic data services for farmers free of charge.Farmers
need to be able to easily create, store and access their data, and The
Climate Corporation will provide basic data services free of charge.

Farmers need to easily access and share their information across
technology platforms. The company will enable farmers to
share their data across other platforms at no cost. This approach
requires industry standards that enable both consistency in the
collection of data and farmers’ easy transfer of that data between
platforms.

The Climate Corporation is forming an Open Agriculture Data Alliance
(OADA) of providers and farmers to act as an independent body that will
ensure that different platforms share common interoperability, common
data formats, and security and privacy standards. Enabling different
systems to work together will give farmers more control, and can
ultimately help farmers optimize yield, improve conservation practices,
and improve the profitability of their operations.

Many other industries, including healthcare, banking, retail and online
services, are leveraging data to deliver improved customer experiences
and new value.

“As data science is applied to agriculture, The Climate Corporation
understands and respects our need to earn the trust of our farmer
customers,” said Monsanto President and Chief Operating Officer Brett
Begemann. “We’re at the forefront of a revolutionary new opportunity to
advance agricultural productivity. We’re taking a bold step in the
direction of transparency to enable the growth of this platform and to
make farming more sustainable as we work to meet the demands of a
growing planet.”

The Climate Corporation aims to help farmers around the world protect
and improve their farming operations with uniquely powerful software,
hardware and insurance products. The company’s proprietary Climate
Technology Platform™ combines hyper-local weather monitoring, agronomic
modeling, and high-resolution weather simulations to deliver a suite of
tools that help farmers manage risk through precision agriculture
products and services, including: precision farming equipment and
software, prescriptive agriculture technologies, and insurance products.
The company’s Climate Basic™ and Climate Pro™, mobile SaaS solutions
help farmers improve profitability by making better informed operating
decisions. The company also offers a suite of full-stack risk management
solutions through Total Weather Insurance, an insurance offering that
pays farmers automatically for bad weather that may impact their
profits, and serves as an authorized provider of the U.S. Federal crop
insurance program. In the face of increasingly volatile weather, the
global $3 trillion agriculture industry depends on the company’s unique
technologies to help stabilize and improve profits and, ultimately, help
feed the world. For more information, please visit http://www.climate.com
or follow the company on Twitter @climatecorp.

About Monsanto Company

Monsanto Company is a leading global provider of technology-based
solutions and agricultural products that improve farm productivity and
food quality. Monsanto remains focused on enabling both small-holder and
large-scale farmers to produce more from their land while conserving
more of our world’s natural resources such as water and energy. To learn
more about our business and our commitments, please visit: www.monsanto.com.
Follow our business on Twitter® at www.twitter.com/MonsantoCo,
on the company blog, Beyond the Rows at www.monsantoblog.com,
or subscribe to our News
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